


Unpick & Weave

by Nununununu



Category: The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Backstory, Character Study, Found Family, Healing, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-29
Updated: 2021-01-29
Packaged: 2021-03-14 11:47:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29045610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nununununu/pseuds/Nununununu
Summary: When he is very young, Din’s parents tell him stories to distract him from the fact they go hungry so he can eat.
Relationships: Din Djarin & Grogu | Baby Yoda, Din Djarin & Original Character(s), Din Djarin/Cobb Vanth
Comments: 25
Kudos: 153





	Unpick & Weave

**Author's Note:**

> A possible story that didn't happen, but might have done. Mild trigger warning for poverty, war orphans and references to non-graphic trauma, grief and parental death, plus a brief mention of hunting for food
> 
> The fic that demanded to be written rather than the one that was intended, inspired by chat on the DinCobb discord about Din's cape <3
> 
> (Update 04/02: slightly edited)

When he is very young, Din’s parents tell him stories to distract him from the fact they go hungry so he can eat. He crosses his legs as he sits at the low table that’s one of the few pieces of furniture in their small room, dipping his spoon eagerly in his bowl of grains while his mother and father sit either side of him and sip at their shallow cups of root tea. The drink has an astringent smell; he doesn’t like it. But when he’s older and has forgotten about this, a similar scent making its way in through the filter inside the helmet, caught unexpectedly somewhere, will make him pause for a second while his eyes inexplicably sting.

“It’s not just the colour,” Din’s father says, and Din already knows colour has a meaning – everyone knows or so it seems to him, because most cloth here is red red red and surely it can’t be for no reason, “The fabric itself is also important.”

“It’s the feel of it,” Din’s mother strokes her fingers over the roughhewn cloth of her son’s sleeve, thinking of the softness she can’t afford at the market, of the thin hand-me-down baby blanket that had been all they’d had to wrap him in. The clothes he’s dressed in now cut from old material too worn to be used by anyone larger; hems and patches sewn back together time and again, embroidery detailed lovingly on the cuffs. She can pick apart the offcuts for the thread in between other tasks, bending her head over it while her husband does the same, the pair of them pressed shoulder to shoulder by the light of the dying fire they stretch themselves to manage in order to keep their son warm, before slipping in beside Din on the narrow pallet they share to chase away the chill of the night.

“The feel of it, Mamá?” Din surfaces from his grains. He hasn’t eaten aside from a piece of flat bread for breakfast pressed with carefully rationed seeds at sunrise; just a few sips of water his father gave him from the battered old canteen hidden under the folds of his clothes at his belt, before continuing work. It’s no way for a growing child, but it’s no way for anyone really – and they have their liberty and their lives. Someday things will be better for their son.

In the meantime there are stories.

“Yes, the feel of it,” Din’s mother warms to the tale, “You see, a long time ago, everyone knew that some material – not all of it, but some – was special. Infused by the love of those who made it or by their consciousness, even.”

Din’s little face scrunches up in thought. There is a grain stuck to the corner of his mouth; he pokes his tongue out to lick it up.

“So the material is alive?” A frown wrinkles his brow as he plucks at the red cloth of his sleeve.

“Not as such exactly,” His mother strokes his hair next, while his father passes over his own cup so their son can drink. Din pulls another face, but there’s no more water left and he is aware of the importance of it. On some level, also of the sacrifice. When he’s older, he will see the child has as much food as he is able to give him and tighten his own belt against the hunger he doesn’t let himself feel.

They catch insects sometimes, out in the fields. Din doesn’t eat them; it’s not allowed. All catches go to the overseer, whether edible or not. He passes the insects over, feeling legs scrabbling against his small hands, withdrawing quickly before the lid of the basket the overseer holds can snap against his fingers.

He’s seen the whip used on his father once; this is just one of the many nightmares he has, even if he’s too young to realise it was aimed at him.

“Just know that wherever you go, our love will always be with you,” Din’s father tells him now, as he smiles at the sight of his son drinking the tea, “Wear red if you can and remember, and never let them see you on your knees.”

“But they make us kneel,” This is a fact of life. It has been ever as long as he was old enough to stand. Din is young, but he still refuses to drink the last few mouthfuls of the tea, pressing it back into his father’s much larger hands, “I can’t manage anymore, Papá.”

It isn’t a lie. His parents have raised him to be honest and he honestly doesn’t like the drink. If it were water – the only other drink he has tasted in his few years, except for his mother’s milk as a babe – he would still not drink all of it. He would want to, though. The thirst, like hunger, rages in him.

He controls it, even at this age.

“Then you do what you must to survive and stand back up again after,” Din’s mother says, her expression steady, her eyes fierce.

When he’s saved by the covert, there is no time for stories. Din trains. He works and grieves and trains, and only one of these is done in what scraps of privacy he has available to him, which is scattered seconds little longer than blinks. Even before they permit him to take the creed, he takes to pulling his dark hood down low over his brow to hide his gaze.

He’d cover his whole face if he could get away with it before he’s granted a helmet; the child who looks back at him in the occasional unwanted glimpse he gets of his reflection is a stranger. No more red cloth, no more soft grains, no more astringent tea. In the covert they drink a silty something that coats the tongue after and does little to quench thirst. Din still guzzles it down when it’s his turn to unhook the metal cup from his belt and dip it under the single cranky tap that only sometimes works, knowing the next trainee is likely to snatch it out of his hands and steal both cup and drink from him otherwise.

He’s given porridge for breakfast, hard and inedible until he breaks it with his spoon. It sits inside his stomach like a cold lump as well as he goes through drills with the others, practices until the next move the next breath the next corner of the training room his eyes are going to land on each time he turns are all he can think about, all he can see. These things stay with him when he huddles on the hard pallet he shares with five other trainees afterwards, elbows and knees poking painfully into his body however he tries to angle himself away. Complaints muttered into his ears when he thrashes with nightmares despite the preoccupation of his exhausted mind, sometimes hard hands holding down his wrists. It makes the panic worse, but he knows better than to say this. He learns to hold his arms around him to keep himself still, to sleep more quietly.

The adults overseeing the training give him weapons. Much of his life before his rescue has become no more than shadow, but there’s something familiar about holding a blade staff stick gun in his hands; his body seeks to bow with it, to work at forgotten fields. He finds himself picking up insects sometimes, eats one experimentally.

It tastes bitter. He considers spitting it out while the other trainees laugh, so ends up crunching it down defiantly.

He gets back up each time he’s knocked down to his knees.

He first meets the Armourer unexpectedly; he looks up when he’s dressing an injury one day by winding a strip of fabric around his upper arm as tightly as he can manage, torn from the bottom of his clothes, a sprain he would ignore except for the fact it would slow him down in a fight. The other trainees are down the corridor waiting their turn at the tap. It’s a rare moment alone until it’s not.

“You work hard,” The Armourer says. Her voice is cooler than the dim light around them. Din straightens up instinctively, although he’s only partially certain who she is.

“I do what I must,” He says politely, chin up, because the creed teaches respect but not submission.

“Indeed.”

Whether she doubts or believes in him, he has no idea. She simply walks away. Crushed for no reason he can explain, Din pulls his sleeve back down and goes to join the back of the line.

She isn’t his mother. At this point Din would feel as if he is the child of no mother or father if he were to allow such a concept to occur to him in anything other than nightmares or nebulous shifting dreams distorted with grief he no longer permits himself to acknowledge. He blinks less often, breathes through emotion rather than experiencing it, channels everything into staying on his feet.

The porridge isn’t enough; he’s given permission to leave the covert for brief periods to hunt and comes to excel at it. Enjoyment isn’t relevant – in truth it horrifies a part of him he isn’t conscious of – but it allows people at the covert to eat meat. With their diet so sparse as it is, the tough flesh and sour blood brings something to life just a little inside him, even if it does make him vomit the first few times, however he sits close enough to the cooking fire to singe his knees and seers the small portion he’s allocated of it until its blackened and almost unrecognisable.

He gets used to it, just as he gets used to everything else. Later, when the child swallows his food whole, alive and still wriggling, Din makes little of it. He’s eaten worms himself by now, worms and crawling and flying insects, anything he can poke onto a stick and roast. Raw also, in a pinch. It’s an easy source of nutrients and a clean pebble tucked into the corner of his cheek soothes the thirst after. The other trainees, growing as they all are, do the same, and fight over each other’s scraps of meat.

He never gets as tall as he might do, but he grows anyway. Wrists protruding out of his clothes, ankles also. They’re moved to a bigger room, while the smaller one goes to newer foundlings. The pallet Din’s allocated to there this time sleeps three. He lies on his back, arms crossed, legs crossed at the ankles, ready to wake at a moment’s notice and punch and kick.

“I have this for you,” The Armourer says when he next encounters her directly. He’s seen her from a distance now, many times, and as part of a group. The folded black fabric sits between them like a puzzle he can’t work out the answer to, “You may consider it an acknowledgement.”

He doesn’t dare ask of what.

The cape hangs well from his shoulders and emphasises his broadening chest. These are things he doesn’t realise or even consider, until the other trainees see him in it and coo at him mockingly and call him all sorts of unflattering things. But the material moves around and behind him as he walks, conceals him in a way he finds pleasing as he adjusts his hood further over his face, and he hits hard enough now to stop the teasing, and leaves the others behind as he walks away.

Whether it is this or that they learn of the Armourer’s involvement, his fellow trainees are chastened on Din’s return. He wraps himself up in the cape at night time, gloved fingers moving over the material as if they can feel it, and a slow stir of something gradually surfaces from the very back of his mind.

There is no embroidery, no detail on the cape, but it still makes him remember his mother’s face for the first time in years. He can’t remember what red looks like, but he cries still and silently all the same.

When Din gets the beskar, he doesn’t paint it. He looks at the possible colours and none of them are quite right. None of them fit. He leaves it bare, unadorned, and the Armourer and his peers in the covert don’t comment on it. If there was meaning to the clothes he wore alongside his parents long ago and long forgotten, there is meaning to this too.

This they all know.

The first night with the child, Din has no idea what to do.

It gets a little better as time goes by and they establish a routine. Swaddling the child in the cape seems to help, as does holding him to his chest. Din has to take the cuirass off for that to be particularly effective, which he can’t bring himself to do often at first. He spoons porridge into the child’s waiting mouth some time before bed, the kid perched on his knee, and wipes up a drip with his thumb. Wipes his glove clean on a corner of the cape afterwards; gradually training himself to use the left to mop up bits of mashed-up food and general drool, the right for snot, the two seeming only correct to separate. A couple of times the child has got sick on the thing. Din washed it out as soon as he was able, but it didn’t smell right even through the filters in the helmet for over a standard week, the little one disconsolate and grizzling until far too late until Din, in desperation, opened up the top of his flightsuit as little as he could get away with and tucked the child in there against his skin.

It becomes a habit after a while – place the kid there on Din’s chest until he drifts off, one hand keeping the tiny body from sliding off, and then bundling him carefully in the cape when he’s asleep. Leaving his hands free as otherwise he’ll squirm and cry out unfamiliar sounds that almost could be words in a language Din doesn’t recognise, but nonetheless sounds like a plea. Things have exploded that way, when the nightmares got bad. A hatch warped once; the ship dropped out of hyperspace two minutes too early. Din was only just in time to prevent them from crashing into a scrap hauler. It would have ripped their wreck apart after for the metal, and let their bodies drift out unattended in space.

They pause one morning on some asteroid in a crowded market run by an alien species whose people all wear purple. Din doesn’t know the colour, has never seen it; through the visor it looks somewhat off-grey. The HUD would inform him, if he pressed the right commands: [colour: purple]. The simple tech has been useful in the past for identifying a mark. He doesn’t use it now and nor does it occur to him to wonder what colour the child is. Whether the wispy hairs on that little head are any particular shade. Red is a washed-out variant of grey and he pays it no heed.

Sometimes he catches himself looking at the child’s eyes and then tipping his helmet down slightly to see that little mouth. If he holds the child at a certain distance he can see both at once, but in slight, small moments of undefined time out in space, he almost wonders if at closer range he would discover details he’s missed. He hasn’t ever seen the kid’s head attached to the whole of the little body as it were, except from beyond arm’s reach, but that thought involves phrasing he doesn’t care to entertain.

They’re in the market now, surrounded by food stalls, and the child is drooling on the cape. Patting Din’s shoulder too, in the desire to be put down to investigate, something Din knows far better than to do. The mounds of spices – colourful perhaps to others, but grey grey grey – look much like they would soon receive little handprints, scented puffs sent up into the air. The rounded fruit sold on another stall proves tempting enough for the little one that Din parts with a credit in return for three to prevent a wail. He lets the little one munch on them as they carry on, one clutched in each eager hand, happy mouth leaking juice over fabric and beskar, and tucks the third away for the kid to have later.

When they round a corner and come across a stall piled high with reams of fabric, his feet come to an unintentional halt. There is embroidery on much of it, beautifully stitched patterns and pictures, and the child’s coo is fascinated. Din spares a moment to wonder what it looks like to those little eyes before moving to continue, unwilling to barter and be fleeced.

“He likes ‘em,” The stall’s owner comments, a being so ancient it’s impossible to discern distinguishing features beyond three pairs of eyes under a shawl adorned with glistening crystals like tiny tears. Fakes, but ones that are reasonably done, just as the material appears reasonably made when Din, sighing, rubs the cloth between gloved finger and thumb.

“You got to pay for that bit now,” The owner says.

“What do you expect me to do with it,” Din asks them as much as the kid.

“Stitch up something for the little one,” The owner replies, while the child just paints on his pauldron with juicy fingers, large eyes still trained on the material, “Wipe his arse with it; what do I care?”

Din doesn’t use the material as a toilet rag. But he unearths his small sewing kit when they’re back on the ship, quickly discovers that anything he does just ruins the look of the embroidery, stabs most of his fingers through the gloves, but eventually fashions a sort of smock thing for under the child’s robes. The kid proves so pleased by this Din feels almost embarrassed. His sewing skills increase after this exponentially; he buys more cloth as time passes, when they can scrape together the credits; supplementing by repurposing some of his own clothes.

If he were to take off his helmet to look at this particular fabric, he would discover it was brown like the rolling fields of rich soft earth they ease down upon on the next planet and the child flings himself onto face first and rolls around in. Din tips up the rim of the helmet when the little one isn’t looking just enough to disengage the filter and breathe.

[Colour: brown] the HUD tells him. It’s been long enough it doesn’t particularly mean anything. He never does quite manage to remember the exact shade of the reddish-brown cloth his mother used to wear over brighter red.

If the scent that comes with the earth makes Din think of his father as well, any associations that come with it mostly scatter out of reach. Drinking something, perhaps – that root tea, the taste lost to time and impossible to replicate. Insects in the overseer’s basket. His mother’s hand in his hair. When the kid flounders in the attempt to climb back up to his knees, Din goes down to his own. Helps the child stand.

“Baba,” The little girl says.

“Oh,” Din holds her gently closer even as something inside him shrinks in pain, “No. I’m sorry.”

He’s back between missions and missing Grogu something fierce, but it isn’t the time to think about that now. This new little one is the only survivor of her village. About to pass the place by as he returned from elsewhere, he did what he had to do to try and save them, but he was too late. Only this girl, hidden down a dry well, her face turned up to his helmet when he wrenched off the heavy flat stone her mother had died halfway through struggling to cover the entrance with.

“I’m not your father,” Din lets her nestle into his side all the same, lets her take the comfort she needs even if his arms don’t feel like they could ever be enough; even if he finds he must be careful not to cling to this child in return given the likelihood such an action would only alarm; his hands numb and strange. The girl’s young enough she doesn’t understand what happened; young enough to trust this stranger who hauled her out and yanked the pauldron off his shoulder in order to press her face against it so she didn’t see.

He used to cradle Grogu like this sometimes, when the little one had had a bump or a scare or simply wanted the closeness or had a tummy ache. Catching the burps in the cape, the dribble and tears. After a while the snot-corner and the drool-corner probably got a bit mixed up, but he tried to clean it fairly often, and he’d seen the kid wipe his nose on that little palm and then lick up the result plenty of times.

The cold now is terrible. The child should be at home curled up with her mother. Instead Din had done his best to arrange the woman into a more respectful posture, her gaze empty and afraid. Had wanted to tell her that her daughter would be all right now, would be safe, but tasted the words for a lie and refrained. As young as she is, the child herself hasn’t asked him to say such a thing.

He can’t won’t mustn’t keep her with him any longer than it takes to confirm if she has any wider family to take her in. Doesn’t want to keep her with him, even as a part of him wants to desperately. She’s small enough she would fit on the new – old – ship no trouble. New to him, but a limping, clanking hulk of a thing barely able to make it through any atmosphere without bits falling off. He misses the Razor Crest almost as much as he misses Grogu sometimes and then feels terrible about it.

Only in that he came to associate the ship so much with his – no. His ward. His charge. Grogu never truly was his son. The kid’s little hammock, the compartment he used to sleep in before that. The changes of underlayers Din sewed and the booties he never did get the child into; the multiple identical robes he paid someone more skilful to make up.

He wraps the girl in the cape for extra warmth and her feet stick out the end. Bare feet, reddened by the cold. Din takes off his gloves – when did he last take off his gloves? He used to bathe the child wearing them at first. Grogu was the first being whose skin he touched since his parents’. The first being to touch his skin since them in return.

The tentative warmth of his bare hands on the girl’s feet makes her kick a bit before she lets out a breath of relief that seems nonetheless far too heavy for a child.

“I’m sorry,” Din finds he’s saying to her over and over, knowing he isn't enough, knowing he shouldn’t can’t never will be, “I’m sorry.”

When she whispers “Thank you, Baba,” he doesn’t have the heart even so to correct her again.

There isn’t any covert to take her to, no place in this world for them to discover for foundlings. Din wanders over a bare pebble beach, the surf oily where it touches the shore, the stones underfoot all _black white grey_. The girl pads beside him, small hand tangled in his cape, hair bedraggled and wind-worn, a hunger that’s somehow familiar on her face. Pinch-mouthed people huddle on the stones under shawls and blankets barely sufficient to keep out the cold, grilling tiny fish over fires that send up sparks and threaten to go out with each gust of wind. It feels like it blows ice through every gap in his armour. Din pauses to tuck the cape more tightly around the girl and tries to bargain for some food for her – the vaguely canine people crowded around the nearest little fire shake their heads at what few credits he has to offer, _no no no_ , and refuse to accept trade. If they speak basic, they speak it too poorly for his helmet to translate. Din tries other languages, tries simply pointing, while the girl bares her teeth at them, rocking backwards and forwards on her heels, and in the end he allows her to lead him away.

She shows him where to dig up insects from the poor soil some distance away from the shoreline, how to dig deeper until enough water wells up from the ground to drown them in, and then they build a little fire of their own, Din blocking the wind with his body while they grill their dinner on a stick.

He raises the helmet enough to eat his share – less than a third of the girl’s, but he wouldn’t eat anything if she didn’t insist in the same unrelenting way that Grogu had sometimes done, pushing the food at him until he had to back away or give in. She tore into the rest with unhidden glee, grunting at the effort of breaking the roasted shells open, licking them out after and grinning at him with blackened teeth.

By this point it’s undeniable that he likes her. The girl picks lice out of her clothes after and cracks them between her filthy nails, moves seemingly to pick them out of his – an offer he this time refuses – and then rubs handfuls of dried out mud from by the edge of the fire over her hands as if this cleans them, leaving streaks of reddish dust up her arms, the tips of her thin stained fingers momentarily visible under the lip of his helmet when he raises it again to drink. She makes no effort to see his face, doesn’t appear interested, and when she calls him “Baba” again she no longer reminds him of Grogu a bit.

He ends up taking her to Tatooine.

There’s no room for foundlings there either, for orphans, but she proves terrified of baths in a way she wasn’t of the sea, and there’s only so many times the two of them can scream each other awake with nightmares on the ship. He doesn’t go with the intention of leaving her, but it does occur to him. Children are expensive and this one bites; just like Grogu he ends up in more fights because of her than less. The girl snarls and snaps at his heels like a massiff in miniature, bristles at any other children they encounter and lashes out at any adult to come close to him. It gets worse as time goes on, not better. Din lets her continue to call him “Baba” without complaint or comment for all he should correct her, and feels something inside him spiralling.

There’s no mission this time, no Armourer to pass her on to, no ending in sight and no one anywhere he goes has heard of this girl, no one cares on her own planet or anywhere else, and she howls for her mother in between sleeping so utterly silently it comes to half terrify him.

He can’t help but imagine that he’s going to wake up one day and she’ll be gone; can’t help but wonder what Grogu is doing, what his son – if Grogu were his son – would make of his sister. If it could somehow be.

He buys material for new clothes for the girl in Mos Eisley, brown like the earth Grogu rolled in face first, brown like the soil the girl showed him how to dig up their dinner from even though he already knew. Din buys them both a long stick of fried locusts dipped in honey after and they eat them as they weave their way through the market, leaving sticky fingerprints on the roll of fabric tucked under his arm. He pushes up the helmet further so he can see and the girl shoves at someone in front of them, so Din must elbow them aside with a muttered warning or have them take a swing.

He sits on the stoop outside the crumbling boarding house they end up staying the night at, peering at his stitching short-sightedly, and an old woman so creased with wrinkles her eyes are nearly lost to them stops to poke her stick at him and offer harsh criticism, then shows him how to make a simple embroidery on what turns out to be a reasonable sleeve.

The girl wears the tunic with as much pleasure as Grogu seemed to wear his underlayers, which is to say they both seem – and seemed – to take it as their due, which has Din perhaps irrationally pleased. He holds her hand as they negotiate hiring a speeder and then helps her up onto it, shows her how it works and then climbs on behind, keeping her balanced and letting her have control of it when they get out onto the dunes. He finds himself considering ways he might be able to convert something to allow Grogu to do the same, one of the first times he has considered his son as a potential future rather than as a past or an unreachable possibility.

They stop off at a few villages on the way to Jabba’s old palace where rumour says he will find Fett, a roundabout route that sees haggled-for saddlebags stuffed with fabrics, different colours and shades, blues and greens the people here don’t seem to favour on their own clothing – the girl chooses the former and Din thinks of his son and the only time they truly saw each other, and feels a milder kind of heartache than usual as he lets himself select the green.

However hot the suns and however unused to them she is, the girl adamantly keeps on wearing the cape. Din wipes the sweat off her brow with it, checks she’s hydrated, and strings it up between the speeder and a stick as a rudimentary shelter for her when they pause for a break. She pees in the sand without making a pretence at doing otherwise, something he’s never been able to train her out of however many times he reminds her to at least step away, and he turns his helmetless head away from her, grateful that at least she doesn’t discard all her clothes and run around naked, like Grogu had used to do.

Din wonders if he still does, if he runs starkers through the corridors of whatever temple he’s supposed to be training in giggling madly, and the huff of laughter doesn’t make his mouth and throat feel like they’re dried out with old dust; that’s just the sand.

He hopes his son is raising hell out there becoming a Jedi; giving that man a time of it. That he has something to laugh as well about. That the man knows just how precious Grogu is.

The girl kicks clean sand over the damp spot, scrubs her hands in another area afterwards and then comes back to tuck her face under his chin.

He doesn’t intend to go to Mos Pelgo. In honesty Din more or less intends to fully _avoid_ Mos Pelgo, but the girl decides for him, spotting the recognisable shapes of the domed houses on the horizon and, sat behind him for once, doing her utmost to clamber up and over him to reach for the steering until he relents.

He’s spoiled her by stopping at everywhere else so far, clearly; it’s set a bad precedent. They swing by the outskirts of the town and she’s jumping down before he can stop her, shrieking at the top of her lungs, and barrelling into the first massiff she sees.

The pair of Tuskens previously strolling down the other side of the sandy street seem perturbed until Din catches up hastily and does some explaining, and the girl chortles madly as she gets the massiff rolling and pleading for more attention every time she pretends to pull away from it.

“I see you’ve got yourself a new one,” A voice observes from behind him, when Din’s considering returning for the saddlebags on the speeder before someone makes off with them and what he might come back to find if he does, and this is the reason, this is the person he hadn’t wanted to see.

Or rather this is the person he had perhaps wanted to see more than anyone except Grogu – no perhaps about it – and just the sound of the man’s voice not filtered through the helmet is almost enough to make Din’s shoulders rise and stiffen, almost enough to have him walk away and just leave.

“Marshal,” Din swallows down the memory of the man’s name like he did that lumpen porridge when he was a trainee, wonders whether he can break it up into something to make it sit in his belly less heavily, wonders whether all his imagining and second guessing will prove incorrect and he’ll be horribly crushed when he turns around to look at Cobb with his own eyes, rather than through the narrow slit of the visor, where the whole galaxy came pre-packaged chopped up into pieces.

He turns and the red of the scarf isn’t the first thing he sees, but it’s the first thing he _notices_ and it drags his attention in until he can hardly look away from it. Red red red like the clothes Din’s parents wore, like the clothes he wore as a child that maybe only had magic infused into them through the jigsaw-pieces of slowly surfacing memory, and maybe there’s no meaning to it but Din finds it means something to him anyway. The fragments of memory sit in his belly as well, the scarf perhaps not the same shade of red, perhaps he never will remember that long ago colour fully or clearly, but it’s close enough that he feels his mother’s hand in his hair as if he’s transported back to then, however many years decades centuries ago, as if time is nothing but a funnel and he’s been dropped into it, and he sees his father’s face for a second, hidden rage banked like a fire on it as he takes a blow intended for Din. Rage at the overseer, rage at their poverty, rage at the hopelessness of their situation even before the end came, and Din’s mother had felt that same anger too, hadn’t she.

Din has burned with it also, but it isn’t anger in any way that he’s burning with now as he flicks his gaze up to Cobb’s face and confirms that yes, the sight of it is still capable of scalding him, that the feeling was in fact lessened by the visor that time ago and now it’s increased, and the space of those weeks months years between the first and only occasion he ever saw this man and now doesn’t in fact mean anything.

“So what’s her name?” Cobb stops propping up the doorway he’s been leaning against, offers a polite nod to the Tuskens that goes equably received, and a pat to the head of the massiff that turns out to be his before the girl grabs his hand and opens her mouth to introduce it to her teeth.

“ _Mija_ ,” Din says sternly enough that she backs down, and, “My daughter,” because he never did manage to introduce Grogu as his son, but he’s going to when he introduces Cobb to his first child a second time; when the three – four – of them are reunited again, he’s going to tell this man all about the kid’s powers and about Mija’s lack of them, but how she’s pretty darn amazing in her own way anyway.

It’s entirely possible Cobb might not want to hear this. But as he sends a cheek-wrinkling glinting look at Din’s face and then away again as if it’s unremarkable, as he clicks his tongue to call the massiff to heel and only staggers a little when Mija promptly runs full pelt at him and crashes into him before scaling up onto his back like he’s not a stranger and she doesn’t hate everyone who isn’t her deceased mother or Din, Din has hope that things will turn out okay.

He glances at the embroidery on the cuffs of the shirt Cobb’s wearing, at the stitching he’s done on his own and his daughter’s, and thinks of the outfits he’s been making for his son to wear in addition to whatever Grogu might wear for training, and hastens his pace to catch up with the trio only to find Cobb waiting for him before turning to continue down the street.

The blanket on their bed is plush, made from a rich dark red fabric that looks purple in certain lights that Cobb had found on some far flung moon and traded for the crystals he was supposed to be parting with in an entirely different deal, and surprised Din with it at home. Din wakes under it now, the light of the moons through the open window enough to rouse him, and finds Mija and Grogu asleep in a bundle of limbs – one set now newly teenage or thereabouts and the other still small – the ageing massiff curled around them, all three of them jammed in next to him on the bed. If Cobb were there, he’d be wedged in on the very edge again no doubt, balanced precariously on one shoulder and hip.

Din rises silently so not to wake them, although the massiff slants open an eye slightly, whuffling quietly in pleasure when he gives it a head scratch before relaxing again. He strokes Grogu’s soft head very gently after and then Mija’s hair, her dark curls just as untameable as they always have been, smiling at the way that, even in sleep, his son’s little green hand is held carefully within his daughter’s longer fingers – however they can be terrors with everyone else, they’ve always been fond of each other almost right from the start.

There’s no noise to draw Din outside, but he forgoes his boots and walks in the cool sand barefoot, and is up at the top of the dune they live nearby by the time a ship descends quietly and touches down, a greater shape of darkness against the backdrop of stars.

Cobb’s waiting there at the top of the ramp when it opens, a bundle wrapped in soft embroidered cloth in his arms.

“Slept soundly the whole journey, from near enough the minute we took off,” Stepping down to join Din, he closes his fingers gently in the folds of the scarf Din’s wearing and reels him in for a kiss, pulling back after to show him the child, “Never made a peep.”

Looking at the tiny face as Cobb passes over the bundle for Din to hold carefully in the curve of his arm, he predicts, “That might change.”

“I reckon we’ll cope all right,” Cobb has a smile for the both of them. Din reaches out with his free hand to tug the other man in for another kiss and adjusts the fall of his cape around Cobb’s shoulders, over the tunic he made him a few years ago and which Cobb washed and wore so often Din had to make another one just like it, just to get him to change.

“Back home?” He asks with a tilt of his chin.

“Back home,” Cobb agrees.

The light of the moons sending their shadows stretching out before them over the sand, they walk there together hand in hand, the newest addition to their family cradled between them, the latest child to be found and saved.


End file.
